Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Harding was born in a small Fenland village in the Isle of Ely in 1951. He studied English at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor before becoming a freelance writer. Harding is the author of two previous novels, What We Did on Our Holiday, which was shortlisted for the WH Smith New Talent Award, and the acclaimed While the Sun Shines. He lives in Richmond upon Thames with his wife and two sons.

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On an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific, Managua—the only native who can read or write—is busily translating Hamlet into pidgin English when a plane interrupts his noble work. Strapping on his false leg, he makes his way to the landing strip to greet the unexpected arrival: William Hardt, a young American lawyer driven by his misguided ambition to win reparations for the island's inhabitants.

Hardt is not the first white outsider to pay a visit; the British came earlier, bringing their language, the small pigs that run wild in the jungle, and Shakespeare . . . and the Americans followed with guns, land mines, and Coca-Cola. But in this place of riotously logical ritual, Hardt's determined quest to do good could make him the most devastating visitor of all.

Profoundly moving and achingly funny, One Big Damn Puzzler brilliantly explores the collision of the twenty-first century with unsullied pagan reality—and establishes John Harding as one of the most imaginative contemporary chroniclers of the human condition.

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One Big Damn Puzzler

Perennial

Chapter One

Although he later swore about the coming of the white man and the disruption to his work that the resultant excitement caused-not to mention the anxiety to him personally-if truth be told, long before the whirring of the plane's three propellers stirred the torpid island air, his task was already suffering insufferable disturbances from his wife Lamua who once again had gotten herself into one big sweat about the pig.

Is be or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler

he had written. He read it over again, allowing his lips to move so he could get the feel of how the words would sound, although he dared not permit even a whisper to escape him. The way Lamua was bustling about the hut, moving this and that (as though she might find the pig here! as if you could conceal even a bantam pig in this single, sparsely furnished room!), any sound from him would be jumped upon like a snake by koku-koku and taken as an invitation to conversation.

'I is tell you now,' she muttered. 'I is eat that pig if is be last thing I is do.'

Managua adjusted his spectacles and peered more intently at his Complete Shakespeare, partly by way of showing Lamua that he was ignoring her but also because the print was so bloody damn small. He must see Miss Lucy about some new reading glasses. This pair seemed to be losing all their strength, but then again that was only to be expected; he had had them for a couple of years and they were second-hand when he got them, or rather second-eye, he told himself. He smiled, congratulating himself on his little joke. It was the kind of joke Shakespeare made all the time, which just showed the benefit of reading the great man, and why it would do the islanders good to see Hamlet.

'You is better not laugh at me now, man,' snapped Lamua, catching him a cuff round the head as she passed his mat. 'I is tell you, that bloody pig you is be so fond of is be good as dead.'

Managua squinted at the next line.

'Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer' was how Shakespeare had got it. Managua had looked up nobler in the dictionary and realized right away that it was one hard word to translate. The island didn't have any nobles. There wasn't even a chief, like he'd heard tell some islands possessed. When something needed to be decided on all the men just crawled into the kassa house and talked it over until everyone was agreed. If it was some little thing they indulged in some kassa first, which generally meant the matter got decided on pretty damn quick since no-one was usually in a mind to argue. If it was something important then they refrained from kassa on the grounds that they needed to think clearly. But if people were thinking clearly in different directions then they might grind a few kassa seeds, mix up the paste and keep spooning it down until they were all so out of their heads that no-one cared enough to argue about what they decided and just wanted to settle the thing plenty fast so they could really get stuck into the kassa. Kassa pretty much ruled out any necessity for nobles.

Lamua was sweeping now and a more disputatious person than Managua might have felt that a disproportionate amount of dust from the hard earth floor was ending up on his books, but he simply brushed it away and got on with his work. Another meaning of noble was 'lofty' and cross-referencing in the dictionary told him this meant high or tall. So for the second line Managua had:

Is you be bigger man for put up with It seemed to him that was what Shakespeare had in mind. And it would be understood, too. Managua was exceptional in height as well as in literary ability; the islanders were not generally big, but rather of small stature, and slim. Bigness impressed them, in body or in mind.

'I is go enjoy slaughter that pig. I is go drink she blood like Coca-Cola, oh yes,' Lamua was saying, as though to herself. Although he knew this was just for his benefit, Managua couldn't help flinching. But then his mind drifted, as he had observed the mind usually will, away from the unpalatable to something pleasurable, in this case the other image conjured up by his wife's words. Coca-Cola. He hadn't felt the harsh tickle of its ice-cold bubbles against his throat for some sixteen years, not since the Americans left, all that time ago. It presented a more powerful, as well as a more pleasing picture, than the one of his wife drinking Cordelia's blood.

'The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'

Well this was sure another damn difficult one. The islanders didn't use slings or bows and arrows and had no knowledge of these things. It was only through his extensive reading that Managua understood what they were. Here they used blowpipes and poison darts-although not at all since the Americans had come and destroyed the only other big village, which had been on the northern end of the island, rendering it permanently uninhabitable by establishing their firing range there and leaving it riddled with mines and unexploded shells when they departed; the sorry remnants of its inhabitants had had no option but to trek south and amalgamate with Managua's village, or disperse themselves among the various smaller settlements and hamlets scattered across the island, leaving Managua's people with no-one to fight. He sighed at the thought of it.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from One Big Damn Puzzlerby John Harding Copyright © 2007 by John Harding. Excerpted by permission.
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